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Last night I got distracted and started fiddling with the layout of the chart for my Christmas Tree Project. I was mainly looking at the layout within the boxes on the chart, experimenting with some different options and wondering about whether to include photos or not.

My big concern is that I don’t really have enough photos of my ancestors, so those ancestors that I do have photos for will stand out more (and receive more attention) than those that I don’t.

I had planned to use a headshot of the individual, to try and get some sort of standardisation across the chart, and when I tried it out on a couple of people I thought it worked quite well.

To try introduce some standardisation, I would like to include a generic image of the same size as the headshot, for those individuals where there is no actual photo. The next question is what should that image be? The size of the image will be 120 pixels by 150 pixels, the same as the photos. The problem is that I can’t decide what to put in image.

I did think a silhouette or outline of a headshot would be good, but after a quick search online I couldn’t find any that I liked, most seemed to have hats or fancy hair which would make them stand out too much and probably not representative of my ancestors.

I did wonder about a few words such as “No photo available” or ‘”Do you have a photo of this ancestor?”. If the text is greyed-out then it shouldn’t detract too much, but to me it still seems a little too cluttered and not really necessary.

I did think I might just put in a large question mark, greyed-out so it doesn’t stick out too much. I think a question mark would get the message across, that I don’t know what they looked like.

What do you think? Have you had the same issue with a chart? What do you do when you have no photo of an ancestor? Am I worrying too much?